How to present the Importance of Design Strategy to your CEO?

The manifestation of designstrategy, namely the creative process itself, is often or even in general not linear, regimented, easily measured, or even described successfully. There is also one other fact, namely that design strategy is rarely seen by others in organizations as strategic or even as possible leadership model of an organization. One of the possibilities design strategists or even designers have, is to visualize strategic design thinking in order to establish effective communication to a leadership of a mayor company. Simple model how to present return on investment of a design strategy is visualised in the Figure below. The first Figure presents when usually a company invites design into a mayor strategic project, looking for a return. Usually that is in the point X of the first Figure when the product and/or service are already in decline. The best that could be done by design and/or design strategy is presented by the line Y.

And what would be the possibility to gain a higher return on investment, be that development or redevelopment of corporate identity, new products and/or new services. And in that process create also an innovation pipeline. Possibility exists by creating a continuous pipeline of innovation, without even reinventing the wheel each time out (Dziersk, 2008, p. 125). The Figure below presents such a possibility by an example of a truly visionary company. We know that every investment, especially strategic investment has a negative return in the beginning of the investment. By creating a continuous wheel a possibility exits to even lower this first phases of negative cash flows. And not least, then there is a possibility to gain higher added value of a investment/s.